Capacity Planning and Management

Balance IT resource supply and application demand

Capacity management is the practice of planning, managing, and optimizing IT infrastructure resource utilization so application performance is high and infrastructure cost is low. It’s a balancing act of cost vs. performance that requires insight into the current and future usage of compute, storage, and network resources.

What is dynamic capacity optimization?

Dynamic capacity optimization is the practice of using automation to make real-time adjustments to virtual and cloud resources as needed to accommodate changing workload needs. Your application performance remains high and you can optimize the use of virtual and cloud infrastructure services (IaaS).

Integrating established and new technologies in the data center – such as private and public cloud, containers, micro services, and even AWS Lambda – requires new and real-time methods of optimizing infrastructure utilization.

Organizations are looking to capacity management to help them understand the best place to run applications – on premises or in the cloud – based on infrastructure resource availability, performance requirements, business policies, and cost.

Capacity management best practices

The practice of capacity management begins with simple, practical questions: exactly what capacity are you looking to manage, and to what end? The answers to these questions will help you create the blueprint for your capacity management efforts. The following three actions will provide the direction you need to get started.

A blueprint for a successful start

How a leading pharmaceutical company put theory into practice

Driving business agility through capacity management

Agility has become a centerpiece for competitive differentiation. For organizations to be agile, they need to be able to plan for future infrastructure resources as well as optimize the use of the ones they currently own.

“The rising need for an agile infrastructure, including cloud solutions, requires a mix of new and traditional infrastructure management techniques.” – Gartner, "12 Key Tasks to Govern the IT Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Management Process," February 2016

99.99%

SLA compliance

9-month

payback

Real-time

performance alerts

Capacity Planning and Management Solutions

Capacity planning, capacity management, and dynamic capacity optimization are all required to balance the investment in infrastructure with the quality of service required for business growth and ongoing success.